what is direct storage?

[adarw]

pls explain lol. its confusing

[Hairless Monkey]

Basically, the GPU gets a direct link to the storage device. Instead of data going through the CPU and system RAM before going to the GPU memory, it can go directly from the storage to the GPU memory.

 

The effect is reduced latency when the GPU needs assets from storage. Practically speaking, there should be less noticeable object and texture pop in, and fewer frame rate hitches and stutters when loading assets.

[Murasaki]

From my understanding of it its accessing game data from an NVMe SSD (textures/assets etc) and loading them to the GPU directly bypassing the CPU/RAM, saving cycles aka its faster.

[adarw]

6 minutes ago, HairlessMonkeyBoy said:

Basically, the GPU gets a direct link to the storage device. Instead of data going through the CPU and system RAM before going to the GPU memory, it can go directly from the storage to the GPU memory.

 

The effect is reduced latency when the GPU needs assets from storage. Practically speaking, there should be less noticeable object and texture pop in, and fewer frame rate hitches and stutters when loading assets.

 

5 minutes ago, Murasaki said:

From my understanding of it its accessing game data from an NVMe SSD (textures/assets etc) and loading them to the GPU directly bypassing the CPU/RAM, saving cycles aka its faster.

 would this add more stress to the gpu?

[Hairless Monkey]

Just now, adarw said:

 

 would this add more stress to the gpu?

Maybe, but I would phrase like this:

 

It would decrease the GPU down time due to waiting for assets from the CPU.

[resolve_beta]

11 minutes ago, adarw said:

 

 would this add more stress to the gpu?

yes but all people care about these day is speed lmao

[Forbidden Wafer]

It is DMA on steroids.

Direct Memory Access lets peripheric devices (PCI) write/read from memory without requiring the CPU itself do the copy/move (one of the reasons old computers simply cannot handle too much network traffic, or storage devices, etc). DMA basically works with the CPU only pointing the starting address and size of a memory block to the target device, and dispatching a command for it to consume the data and to do its thing on its own, then raise an interrupt when it is done. If the device wants to write to memory, it sends a message requesting a specific block size, CPU indicates the block, device copy the contents and raise the an interrupt.

DirectStorage basicaly lets not only CPU do that, but let PCI devices communicate directly (AFAIK, they could already do it, as PCI is a bus interface and everybody can listen to everything, but there was no standardized way for that to happen).